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Shortly after Ledezma took the oath of office in 2008, pro-government mobs took over the colonial City Hall building in central Caracas and refused to let the new mayor go to work. Helen Fernndez, a Ledezma aide who now serves as acting mayor, recalls the scene.

"They threw rocks and chased after us with clubs," she says. "There were gunshots and tear gas. The violence got so bad that we had to leave."

Ledezma and his team relocated in the 23rd floor of a bank tower in downtown Caracas.

Many people who work in the high-rise have no idea City Hall is located there — perhaps because it doesn't do very much. Back in 2009, ruling party legislators passed a law stripping Caracas City Hall of nearly all of its budget and responsibilities.

Opposition supporters in Caracas protest against the Venezuelan government and in support of jailed opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma on Feb. 28. Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters/Landov

One of the few programs Ledezma's office still runs is the distribution of water tanks to poor families. With her boss behind bars, Fernndez, the acting mayor, oversees these duties in a Caracas slum.

Nearly all other city functions are handled by an unelected city manager named Ernesto Villegas, who was not available for comment. President Maduro appointed Villegas to the job just two days after he lost to Ledezma in the 2013 mayoral race.

"That is something I have never heard of in any other country in the world," says Milos Alcalay, who handles international relations for City Hall. "'OK, you lost the election? Don't worry, my friend. You are still the mayor of Caracas.'"

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Alcalay says that as the president's popularity sinks, the Maduro government is resorting to drastic measures to prevent the opposition from picking up steam.

Nationwide, three mayors as well as opposition leader Leopoldo Lpez have been imprisoned on what the human rights groups say are trumped-up charges.

However, the opposition can also play rough. At a state-run grocery store, where people were standing in line to buy subsidized food, I met Nelson Barrio, who was wearing a red Socialist Party T-shirt.

Barrio briefly worked for Ledezma in the 1990s when he served as mayor of a district of Caracas. Barrio says that he and 800 other workers were fired because they didn't belong to Ledezma's political party.

"Venezuelan politics have always been hard-core," he says.

But back at the mayor's damaged private office, Mitzi Ledezma says that the arrest of her husband marks a new low.

"The government will have to build a lot more prisons," she says, "because the opposition is getting bigger by the day."

Venezuela

Supermarkets devote aisle-end displays to Spam and its familiar blue and yellow tin. A local Hormel licensee, CJ CheilJedang Corp., manufactures the product here, printing the logo on one side with characters from the Korean alphabet, known as Hangul.

It's relatively cheap, too: A 200-gram can costs about $3.

At that price, many Koreans view it as a tasty side dish, especially as processed foods go. "It's seen as a high-end luncheon meat," says Cho Hye-Jin, who works in Seoul. "Out of the variety of luncheon meats available in Korea, Spam is probably the best quality."

Cho and Park Jin-Hong, both construction consultants, say they most often see their peers consume Spam along with soju — a clear alcoholic beverage made with rice, potatoes or other starches. Park says Spam isn't a staple of his diet — "it's too salty" — but he does enjoy it.

He said he prefers a low-sodium version, one of two varieties (along with the original) sold in Korea. Customers here can also buy prepackaged Spam products, such as fried rice, in frozen-food aisles.

South Koreans aren't the only Asians who use Spam in traditional meals. In the Philippines, for example, it's sometimes served in rellenong manok, a stuffed chicken dish. They're also not the first to adopt specialties introduced by the U.S. military.

Perhaps the most iconic Spam dish in South Korea is a spicy soup known as budae jjigae, or army stew. After the war, Koreans used U.S. Army rations — sometimes smuggled off military bases or donated by soldiers — to make the deep-red dish.

This concoction comes in many varieties. Restaurants use a mix of hot spices, noodles, Spam, sausage, beans, corn, green vegetables — even cheese. It has been called "pig stew," "soldier stew" and "Johnson's stew," the latter after our 36th president.

Chris Amoroso, an American, discovered budae jjigae a few years ago while teaching English here. He liked it so much that he created a video on YouTube explaining the dish's colorful history. "It's delicious," he tells viewers, sitting before a boiling pot.

"It is not a soup that one can eat often. It's so rich and probably not very healthy," he tells The Salt. "Americans should know that if they ever get a chance to go [to Korea], they should definitely try it."

While the soup is an ingrained part of the food culture here, seasonal gift boxes are still a big reason why Spam sales are so strong in South Korea. The gifts typically come in Spam-branded boxes, with as many as nine cans inside, along with other items, like cooking oil. Families exchange them during the traditional harvest holiday season, known as chuseok, in early fall, and the Lunar New Year. Bosses hand them out to employees.

These boxes represent more than half of Hormel's annual Spam sales on the peninsula, the company says — perhaps one reason for the slick advertisements promoting them in South Korea.

Later in the short video advertisement described above, the camera switches between enticing rice and noodle dishes, an elegant sandwich and multiple cans of Spam. One by one, the cans fill the gift box. The young woman returns and smiles into the camera. She later shyly tucks her hair behind an ear while looking down, as if pondering something special.

The music continues. "We have prepared the gift set with all our hearts," says the narrator. "Spam gift set — everyone knows what it's worth."

Gray, who lives in Seoul, believes he knows the product's value here, too.

"I always joke with guests who come to Korea, 'See, you could have packed a whole suitcase of Spam. You would have made a lot of friends."

Hae Ryun Kang contributed to this report.

Matt Stiles, who recently tried Spam in ramen noodles, is a former data editor at NPR and currently a Seoul-based freelance journalist. You can share your Spam stories with @stiles or @NPRFood.

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Some people were born knowing what they want to be when they grow up. Brad Bird, the mastermind behind Pixar's The Incredibles and Ratatouille was one of those kids. At age thirteen, Bird finished his first animated film, a remake of The Tortoise and the Hare that ends in a five-way tie. He told Ask Me Another host Ophira Eisenberg, "My parents told me to send it to the [most famous] person and work my way down." Luckily for Bird, the most famous person ended up being Milt Kahl, a legendary animator at Disney, who took Bird under his wing (pun intended).

In 2011, Bird made a daring leap into live action films, helming the fourth installment of the Tom Cruise franchise Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Bird's latest project, Tomorrowland, is, like much of his work, intended for adults and children alike.

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With all that he's done, it's easy to forget he played a key role in the early development of another animated institution, The Simpsons. Bird directed multiple episodes, and even designed the character of Sideshow Bob. For Bird's VIP game, we see how well he remembers the citizens of Springfield by subjecting him to a speed round about famous Simpsons catchphrases.

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"I was exceedingly cheap and available."

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It's very difficult nowadays because everyone has a device with which they can ruin your movie. They print things on paper so that nobody can copy them, but they also make them impossible to read when you're on the set.

Sen. Tom Cotton accused President Obama of holding up a "false choice" between his framework deal on Iran's nuclear program and war. He also seemed to diminish what military action against Iran would entail.

"Even if military action were required," the freshman Arkansas Republican senator said on a radio show Tuesday hosted by the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins. In the comments first picked up by BuzzFeed, Cotton also said: "the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq. That's simply not the case."

"It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days of air and naval bombing against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we're asking is that the president simply be as tough in the protection of America's national security interest as Bill Clinton was."

That bombing operation lasted four days and hit nearly 100 Iraqi targets after U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully cooperated with inspections.

Of course, military analysts point out that Iran is a larger country than Iraq with a more sophisticated military.

"The only thing worse than an Iran with nuclear weapons would be an Iran with nuclear weapons that one or more countries attempted to prevent them from obtaining by military strikes — and failed," said Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, in 2013.

Added Jim Walsh, a researcher at MIT, who has studied Iran's nuclear program, "I fear that a military strike will produce the very thing you are trying to avoid, which is the Iranian government would meet the day after the attack and say: 'Oh yeah, we'll show you — we are going to build a nuclear weapon.' I think we will get a weapon's decision following an attack, which is the last thing we want to produce right now."

Cotton — who orchestrated a letter to Iran's leaders, which 46 other GOP senators signed onto disapproving of any potential deal with Iran — also called the president's underlying assumptions in making a deal "wishful thinking."

"It's thinking that's characterized by a child's wish for a pony," he said.

It's not the first time bombing Iran has come up around political campaigns. It was almost exactly five years when John McCain joked in New Hampshire about bombing Iran, singing "that old Beach Boys song, 'Bomb Iran.'"

"Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah....," he sang to the tune of "Barbara Ann."

McCain, though, has also long noted that military action should be a last resort.

Hillary Clinton even said during that election cycle that if Iran attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon, "We would be able to totally obliterate them."